


For what you stand to gain

by glittersnipe



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Blackmail, Drugs, Dubious Consent, M/M, SO MUCH COCAINE, horrible horrible boys, i stan dad AKA kendall, large adult sons, second person pretention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 02:57:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21190436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittersnipe/pseuds/glittersnipe
Summary: He is sweating, flushed, drunk, crumpled in on himself. He looks good down there, on your floor, on his knees.You're going to get what you want out of Kendall, sooner or later.





	For what you stand to gain

_ THERE IS A PERIOD WHEN IT IS CLEAR THAT YOU HAVE GONE WRONG BUT YOU CONTINUE. _

_ SOMETIMES THERE IS A LUXURIOUS AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS. _

Jenny Holzer

****

You know you come off as a total douchebag, and hey, it’s probably because you actually are in fact a grade-A, kosher halal praise to Jesus or whatever organic free-range certified-no-hormones-but-a-fucking-ballsack-worth-of-testosterone douchebag. If the shoe fits and all. But you’re a successful douchebag. You’re the primo douchebag to watch out for, in fact, because you’re a smart douchebag and you have a big fucking dick on top of that. You’re smart, is the thing, because you don’t get successful without being smart (not if you’re doing it yourself that is), and if you know people you’re smart. That’s one thing you know: people. That’s the bit that most of the spoiled pricks don’t get. And but so yeah, you’ve been around smart people, Harvard undergrad, Yale business school, a few years with those fucking hippies smoking weed and pretending you’d seriously do yoga on Sand Hill, back to the East Coast via a sweet McKinsey gig -- none of that means shit, plus only fucking dorks actually remember undergrad, which come on.

When you know people, everything’s useful. People don’t think you’re that smart: great, use that. People think you’re a flashy parvenu? Cool, perfect. Everything is information. Everything people do -- what it says about them? Worth way more than whatever they’re actually trying achieve. You learned quick, because you never had the luxury. You go to their parties and you figure out what they want and what they’re trying to sell you and then you sell it back to them, because you’re smarter than like 90% of these fucking morons. Who think they’re also smarter than you. It’s like the circle of life, kinda, if Simba and the like gay meerkat and warthog had just sat around ripping fat lines and smashing lion pussy. You like these guys. They’re your guys. You fuck them and they fuck you back. You all make a million dollars and go get laid. Everyone wins. 

So parties are your business, even the shitty ones, which is why you ended at this weird loft party trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Great space, great views, there’s a bar and bartenders and some great coke going around, all the usual shit, but there’s barely any furniture and what there is is basically IKEA, which doesn’t add up. So you’re sniffing around -- ha ha -- trying to figure it out but after a while you get bored, so you go into the bathroom to do some keybumps like a white girl. The bathroom, again -- Italian marble but there are pubes on the toilet so no cleaner, plus you think you see a literal can of Axe which is a real -- like, really? You do another bump for good measure and you feel the course of energy throb through you all good and _ hey who the fuck is UP _ and you think time to massacre these fucking pieces of shit, time to get fucking going. You come strutting out of the bathroom like king dick of fuck mountain and then you walk directly into who’s apparently the host despite being like a literal child which okay, hello. He’s standing right in your way and there’s frankly a bit too much of him, coming at you from all angles. He needs to be folded up so there’s just less going on because right now honestly it’s really a lot. 

“Uh, hi,” he says, this fucking Jack and the Beanstalk bastard leaning right over you, kinda blocking your path to be perfectly honest which you’re not all that thrilled about. You try to move around him and he sort of, like, propels his body into your path, which like, what? 

“Look, man,” you say, “I’m flattered, but I don’t swing that way.” which isn’t strictly true, just not with fucking 10 foot tall twelve-year-olds, or maybe he’s two children stacked on top of each other. 

“No, uh,” he says, and it’s like his tongue is somehow wringing itself like his hands, and he hesitates before he suddenly blurts out “Look, man, were you doing drugs in there?”

“Uh,” you say, and you kind of gesture around because, like, is the sky blue? Does that stripper Skye you like down at the slummy Brooklyn club you go sometimes have blue hair? “What? Yes? Did you want some?”

You’re not sincere when you’re saying this obviously but like what’s going on. What’s the angle here. You don’t like it when you don’t know what’s up -- and this is all fucking weird, nice apartment, shitty furniture, shaking down the guests for drugs.

“Oh,” he says, and kind of, like, flaps at you. “No! Oh! I -- uh -- no, not for me,” and then he leans in conspiratorially. “I have a _ client_,” he says. 

“Are you, like, a rent boy, bro?” you say because what the fuck is going on.

“No!” he says. “No, no, God, no -- not that there’s anything wrong with that -- I support sex workers’ rights you know?” -- which you don’t actually but sure, okay -- “I have, uh, a friend. He really, uh, he really wants some, uh, drugs. Like,” he glances around. “Like, _ cocaine_.”

“Uh, okay,” you say, because it sure still sounds like this friend is his john

“That’s not park coke, is it?” he says.

“What the fuck is park coke?” you say, and now you’re over this bullshit but you want to know who this john of his is, because that would explain a lot about the whole apartment situation. Who’s funding this and what in general is his equity situation? “Look, who wants coke? I mean that’s a weird thing to ask your guests, but hey, I’m generous.” Nosy, too. “Bring him over then man.”

The kid somehow squirms more like a worm on a hook and then says “Well, the thing is, he’s kind of, maybe you could just come with me?”

“For fuck’s sake,” you say, and then, “you want me to suck his dick, too?”

“Uh, no thank you,” says the kid, and then kind of drifts off. You think fuck it why not and you follow him through a heated pulsing crowd of bodies in thousands of dollars of apparel and bejewelled with expensive teeth. You’re following this gangly fucker and you’re all curious to finally figure out who’s been funding this little drug-seeking prick when he gestures and then you realise that this friend of his is Kendall, who is currently obliterated out of his fucking mind. It’s getting to that time of the night where everyone’s a little loose and it’s acceptable to be like visibly on it, but even then, Jesus. You’ve seen Kendall hammered out of his mind more times than you can count because the guy never could really hang, even if you think all the rehab bullshit was kinda just the kinda classic woe-is-me attention-seeking he always used to pull, the crying and shit. 

You’re not one of those stereotypical rageoid coke heads -- you keep your shit together -- but seeing his shitty puffy junkie face makes you seize with anger and Christ you want to wrap your fingers beneath that nonexistent chin of his and just _ squeeze _ for the bullshit he pulled on you. Like, he totally fucked your plan, went running back to, like, lick his dad’s balls or whatever he spent his time doing with the rest of his creepy fucking family, went on TV Xannied out of his fucking junkie brains, slurring off the fucking prompter? And now he’s just like paying some teenage boy to fuck him and bring him coke? Is that what’s going on? Is he fucking serious?

In the crowded room, in the half-light, with his face slack and almost vacant from whatever like horse tranquilizer he’s on, whatever shit he can put up his nose, you could almost be in college. Suddenly, you’re back in one of those parties you used to go to in college, your friends’ empty apartments in Park Slope while mom and her tennis instructor were away in the Hamptons. You’re watching Kendall, at 20, drunk off his ass, smiling loosely in a way you’d never seen him do sober. At parties, where he didn’t so much learn to stop trying to hard as learn how to just let it go and drown in it instead. He never could hang. 

“Hey Kevin Spacey,” you say, and part of you still wants the deck the droopy-eyed little fuck but then you get up closer to him and you realise how fully, truly out of it he is. In a way you haven’t seen in years. “Your rent boy here brought me over.”

Because that’s the thing: you know people. And you know Kendall. You’ve known each other since you were like five, so basically your whole life. You remember him weirdly well from your first day of school, actually: this little pale dweeb. You remember it because he’d cried, actually, which was lame and embarrassing and still makes you wince. You were the oldest son too. You didn’t cry. You knew.

“Kendall,” you say, and he focuses on you this time, and a big sloppy grin spreads across his face, and he says, “Bro!” in that dweeby-ass way he has and goes in for a hug and basically falls onto you.

So he’s too far gone to remember that he fucked you, huh. Or that you fucked him. That’s interesting, too. 

So: you know Kendall really well. And this is great -- this is useful. You bring him home -- not to his home, back to yours, maybe feed him some more booze, see if you can get the real story out of him. He was always a weepy drunk, always lonely. So why not his old buddy Stewy? You bring him over, he cries on ol’ college roomie’s shoulder, probably tries to suck his dick again for old time’s sake, you pull him off because he gives toothy head when he’s plastered, you put him to bed. Just like the old days. He wakes up in the morning, he knows he fucked up but doesn’t remember how -- and wow, hey, look, Ken, you’re in your old friend Stewy’s house and yes, Ken, you did get so blackout drunk you went home with me and yes, Ken, we both know you made a pass at me and doesn’t that shame just make you want to die? Doesn’t it make you want to do just _ anything _ to make it go away, Ken? What else might you have told your only friend, huh? What else are you hiding in there?

His mouth is wet against your neck which like is that deliberate or what.

“Bro,” you say. “Hey, man.”

“You know him?” shouts Lurch and Kendall yells “Fuck off, Greg,” and laughs like a maniac.

“Yeah, we know each other, man,” you say. “Look, Ken here needs to sleep it off, so I’m gonna take him back with. We cool?”

You can tell Greg is uncomfortable with this but you can also tell that you can bully the shit out of him, and he knows that you know that he knows that, so he lets you leave with Kendall clinging to you like a fucking tick, wrapped all around you. You fight through the crowds and you see some knowing prep-school glances which fuck you. You’re a good friend. 

Outside the street is haloed in streetlight and Kendall is still hanging off of you, slurring incomprehensible shit. You light a cigarette and then you light one for him which he can surprisingly hold aloft and you text your driver and hope that nobody thinks you’re, like, doing a kidnap or anything. There’s probably security though. That’s the thing with Kendall. He’s always got a safety net. He can fuck up as much as he wants. “Stewy, it’s so good to see you. Despite -- I _ love _ you, man,” he suddenly says with total sincerity. He is staring at you affectionately, blurred and sloppy and smiling, totally out of his fucking mind.

“Sure, you too bro,” you say, and then “no homo, though” for good measure.

“Uhhhhhh okay, _ Kanye _,” Kendall says, and looks real proud of having gotten a reference from, like, ten years ago. He snickers and then asks in that flat staccato way he has, “Okay, so where’s the party? Where are we going?”

“We’re going back to mine, dude,” you say. “We’re going to catch up,” and Kendall rolls his eyes and slurs something incomprehensible but you catch “_ coke _” in it. You’d forgotten how relentless he is when he’s truly fucked up. When he wants something. Like sure, you want things too, but mostly you want to be rich so you can own stuff other people can’t and get your dick sucked. You know, like: things. Kendall just wants and wants and wants. There’s a sucking wound inside him. 

“Yeah, I got you, buddy,” you say, and he grins at you unseeing and thankfully your lazy asshole driver arrives then so you bundle him into the car. He’s laughing and kind of flaps his arms around to fuck with you until you grab him by the shoulders and force him into the car but you’re laughing too. “Hey,” Kendall says, patting the leather interior, “Fucking nice. Italian?” and then immediately passes out. Which like fuck. You think about trying to like physically stuff some coke up his nose to wake him up but you shake his shoulder and he is well and truly just out cold so knowing your luck his heart would just explode or something instead. So he’s not spilling the beans tonight. So much for Plan A. 

You tip your driver a hundred to help you drag Kendall into the elevator and up to your spare room and you briefly consider giving him another hundred to spill the story, actually. Logan Roy’s degenerate junkie son. He’s sprawled out on the bed unconscious and you open up his nice tailored shirt and rearrange his limbs for maximal degeneracy and take a pic, just for insurance. You roll up his sleeves to see if there are trackmarks, which does admittedly make you feel gross but you never know, and also, fuck him. Then you roll him over so he won’t choke on his own puke and you turn the lights off and go watch TV for a few hours and smoke one joint and then another until you come down enough to go to sleep. Bummer of a night but hey -- useful. You’ve got a plan now.

Your apartment is fucking huge and dope as hell by the way but you still wake up to the sound of retching into the toilet which, like, wow, he must be puking up basically everything left in his body if you can actually hear it. It’s not exactly surprising but you wince all the same. He has this way of always getting to you like that. 

You go out and wait for a break in retching -- dude sounds like a fucking garbage disposal, gross -- and then you tap on the door. “Morning, sunshine,” you say. “You having a good time in there?”

“Fuck off,” Kendall says faintly through the door, and then there’s more retching.

“I’m going to bring you some Alka Seltzer, man, you sound rough as fuck.”

When Kendall finally opens the door he looks so bad even you’re shocked. He’s sweating and pale, his face rubbery and puffy, hanging off his skull, his eyes like pouchy little fried eggs cradled in fleshy folds. He smells appalling: stale cigarettes, weed, beer. Something treacherous and warm and unknown comes unstuck inside of you, suddenly. This is bad. The fucking, like, this fucker who’s what? Forty? And can’t clean up his own messes? Still? And how even after he’s literally been vomiting vodka and god knows what else there’s still that little bit of you that wants to. You want to want to kick him out, honestly. He’s a grown man. But you can’t.

“You doing okay, man?” you say. He stiffens a bit and you think, oh yes. He doesn’t like that, the acknowledgement.

“Yeah, sure,” he says, his eyes cutting away. Shame rolling off him like a stinking cloud. You want to bully him. There’s something about him that just fucking invites abuse. You hate cowards like him: snivelling, grovelling. You always thought Kendall had more balls that that, but hey, turns out you were real fuckin wrong there you guess. 

“Man,” you say, and you stretch, trying to look like a healthy human being, not like it’s tough given present company but sure. “It’s what, ten? I have a rough fucking hangver dude. I could use a beer.” You check your watch: 10am. Brunch time, so plausible deniability. “How about you?”

“Uh,” Kendall says. Like dude. Like he’s not going to. Like you both don’t know how this is going to go. “Uh, I -- yeah, uh, sure.”

So you go and get some Alka Seltzer and two beers and you drink one and he drinks the Alka Seltzer and the beer and then pukes the beer back up and you bring him a vodka / Gatorade combo like you’re back in college which goes down a little easier. 

You drink up too -- for old times’ sake, you know? You can’t leave a guy hanging. And Kendall won’t do it alone, or more like, he will absolutely get fucked up alone, you’ve seen him do it plenty of times, but he’ll just shut down if he does it, no fun. You shared that apartment 20 years ago and even now you remember walking in, seeing him absolutely destroyed, completely alone. He’ll get fucked up alone but he’ll do it even faster if someone’s there alongside him. It’s like he’s got a finger on his own trigger. All you’ve got to do is give him a nudge. All he wants is someone to be with him while he does it to himself. 

You’re still in the bathroom, you’re wearing some kind of alpaca or whatever sweats your stylist picked out. Kendall is wearing last night’s clothes, some Japanese selvedge jeans (yeah okay and you know the exact brand but who gives a shit) and a nice shirt. His feet are bare, pale. 

You drink and you shoot the shit and as it hits you see Kendall relax back into himself, or some version of himself. It’s almost fun, almost like the old days, except you're honestly better looking now you're only out smashing puss like maybe three nights out of every week versus your week-long, month-long benders back in the day. The legendary days when you could, like, verify that Kendall actually had a fucking dick instead of whatever oversized clit he has in his dad's chastity cage.

You may or may not have brought up the vodka and the mixers and (very responsibly, you think) some Topo Chico for hydration purposes. You see him considering or rather, like, putting on a show of considering, like you actually believe his bullshit for one second. He's reasonably believable when he wants to be, but you're not fucking reasonable and you don't buy believable, you trust but you fucking verify baby. And what you are verifying right now is that raw hunger inside Kendall Logan Roy to get absolutely fucking wasted into oblivion. You know that look in his eye: the clawing desire like he's trying to climb out of his own skin. He drinks the vodka very fast. Even for him. And like you said you think that the whole rehab thing was really a lot, like, what's the fucking point of an MBA if not to network, but. There is something weird going on here. His hands are shaking.

So you really want to know what's bringing on all this and so you bring out some coke after a while and all of a sudden it’s like 2pm and you’re both sitting totally fucked up in your huge bathtub, tunes fucking blaring from this sick Anker speaker you got years back, laughing about something like you don’t even know what. You literally never use your bathtub except for some extremely good sex you had in it a few years back with who? Payzlee? Taylor? McKenna? You were rolling and she had great tits. Who cares. The light is slanting in through your big expensive windows and catching in the hazel green of Kendall’s eyes and you can almost, for a second, forget how much you hate him now and how that fucker double-crossed you. He’s looking at you now with that glazed almost dreamy look in his eyes, like he’s not there. You would say peaceful but nobody with this much cocaine animating their cardiovascular equipment could reasonably be considered peaceful. He has instead the muted dazed look of the cocaine user who has passed the fun stage and is into the buzz maintenance stage. 

“So, about last night, dude,” you say. “You, uh, you remember anything?"

“Uh,” he says, trying to snap to, you can see his shoulders come up, putting on the businessman. You’re fucked up but he’s more fucked up. “I, uh -- uh,” and he could never lie for shit which makes sense because he also can’t tell when someone’s lying to him.

“Uh uh uh,” you say to him in that stupid staccato stutter he does like he’s choking on air, some kind of creature dragged from its own ocean, not meant for the sun. “Uh uh uh _ do you remember last night Ken_,” because well if there’s one thing he responds to. You’re stern. You know what works. And sure enough once there’s enough edge to your voice he coughs it out: “Uh, no, I uh guess I had a lot --” he looks at you, recalibrating “I mean, yeah, I was blowing off some steam,” he finishes with pathetic bravado. Which like. You were both there last night or at least Kendall was nominally there and you both know what was happening but okay. Okay if he wants to do a whole thing then sure.

“That’s not what I was asking, bro,” you say then.

“Oh uh okay,” he says, with that snide little tone, like, _ oh fuck me? No no buddy fuck you _ \-- “What _ were _ you asking then _ Stewy_.”

“I was _ asking _ do you fucking _ remember _ what you _ did _ last _ night, _” you say. You’re feeling around like a tongue in a tooth socket. Ping the nerve. Kendall flinching. “Or what you said, maybe.” 

He stops suddenly and oh boy, you think. That landed like a fucking nuke. His face flattens. There you go, you think. There it is. Now what is it?

“What I _ said _?” Kendall says, swallowing. He jerks the Grey Goose Gatorade to his mouth and empties like half of it into his mouth.

“Yeah bro,” you say, trying to play it serious but not judgey. Like, yeah you fucked up but haven’t we all? And don’t you maybe want to tell your old friend Stewy again, get it off your chest? “You know, you had a lot to say,” you add, trying your luck.

“Like what?” Kendall says. He is suddenly very still. You’ve totally struck gold. He is looking at you very intently. The afternoon light is harsh and pale and he looks sick sweating beneath it, the sun picking out shards of green and brown in his iris like broken bottles.

“Well, you know,” you say, and you think fuck it. “You wanted to make it up to me. Because you fucked me on the bear hug when we had a deal, and then all of a sudden you were like bending over for daddy --”

“Oh _ fuck _ you,” Kendall says but there’s an edge in his voice you don’t recognise, something high-pitched, kind of hysterical.

“Yeah, you’d have tried that too if you could’ve kept it up,” you snap at him, and his head snaps back and he presses his mouth closed shut, his lips going white.

“_ Fuck you_,” he repeats. “What did I _ say_,” and there’s that raw edge again. 

“I --” you say, and honestly it was kind of a half-assed plan anyway, you’d assumed he’d just fold like he always eventually does because he trusts people he loves even when they literally tell him they will fuck him (which you did by the way! To his actual literal face!). You thought maybe’d say hey Kendall so you told me about why you fucked me last night and he’d say aw fuck Stewy I just can’t help spilling my guts to you and then maybe hopefully repeat what you had both theoretically discussed. It was worth a shot. He had a confessional streak that came out sometimes when he was drunk and it was just the two of you. But the way he’s looking at you now is weird and ugly.

“Look, okay, man, you didn’t say anything,” you admit. You put your hands up in the air like he’s got a gun. “I was fucking with you. You were trashed at that party -- which was lame and really weird by the way -- and I brought you home and put you to bed. And you better not have puked on anything, asshole.”

He’s still looking at you weird but he relaxes a fraction, just a little. But like also -- what the fuck?

“I --” he says. He looks down, at his hands, the fingers bare (you had wanted to fuck Rava, you’d tried even, just to prove a point, but she was just like him, she wouldn’t stray). “I, uh.” He looks up and he’s sloppy and coked up enough that you can see the computation. “Right. Okay. Okay.” His face twitches. “S-sorry about that. I, uh, I guess I forgot to eat yesterday and it went to my head.”

So you’re not talking about it. So he’s hiding it. Which means not only did something happen but something major happened. Which means you’re on to something and you were on to something last night and maybe if you can get him to that sweet spot right before he passes out you might get it out of him this time. 

“Yeah,” you say because whatever. He can go beat himself up for being a junkie on his own time. You don’t give a shit. “The thing is, I don’t fucking care, bro,” you say, digging your thumb into your forehead. You drink some more of the triple G too. You are pretty fucked up and the thing is you are so fucking furious at Kendall that you could rip his junkie head off his junkie shoulders and use his own tongue to give himself a prostate massage. And now that it's clear that he intends to keep lying to your face you have just gotten more and more drunk and more and more angry. But you bide your time. You always do.

“Right,” Kendall says. “Fuck me, I guess.”

“Yeah, fuck you, dude,” you agree. You both sit there drinking your mid-range vodka with Kendall sniffing intermittently. 

“So are you going to tell me why you won’t tell me why you pussied out,” you finally say.

“No,” Kendall says, and ducks his head. “Man, it’s fucking bright in here. I uh,” that weird constipated voice when he’s trying to sound casual, “I didn’t try anything else did I?”

“Like what,” you say, flatly. For fuck’s sake. You wanted one thing and it sure as fuck wasn’t that.

He kind of winces at you and his face jerks in that creepy way again, “You know,” he says and kind of gestures vaguely but spastically at you and his eyes cut away, so you say suddenly because fuck him if he thinks he’s so irresistible, “No, Kendall, I did not want your gross limp dad dick, and also you passed out in my fucking car the second you sat down so calm the fuck down bro,” and he says, “Oh.” He breathes in and out very rapidly. “Okay.”

“What is _ wrong _ with you,” you say. This is so fucking weird that he would ask this. And how weird he is being. You two haven’t fucked in years. You don’t have that kind of relationship -- you never did, you both just liked molly a whole lot. _ I never knew I could feel this good_, Kendall would say, incredulous, running his hands over his own body. You don’t know why you remember that when you have so many other better sex memories with better looking people and more importantly hot female model looking people but the memory of that great broad grin on Kendall's face is still sharp in your mind. His face all open and glowing. But also you’re basically straight. Kendall laughs, a sudden noisy bark, and rolls onto his side. “Well nothing now,” he says, and waves his empty Gatorade like a flag. “I feel _ great _. You got any more coke?”

A few hours later you are well and truly just totally fucked now, the two of you, you’ve been talking in circles for hours and hours. The sun has chased you out of the bathroom and into the sitting room where you’re spread out on a couch and Kendall is on the floor with his legs sprawled across your Beni Ourain. The sun is blazing down in its great winter brightness, the sky frozen blue. Kendall is wearing sunglasses which where did those come from, and he looks lame as shit. You are still wearing sweatpants. There is a picked-over delivery sushi platter disregarded to the side, big beefy sides of maguro and o-toro sweating pinkly which you should probably put in the fridge at some point. The place you like where the owner knows you, he flies the fish in from Tsukiji, it’s a miracle he indulges your slothful Yankee shit and actually lets you get it delivery -- it’s an insult to the craft actually you’re pretty sure and if he legitimately cared as much about sushi as he says he does then yeah. But it’s amazing what you can disregard for enough cash. Bit on the fucking nose there huh. 

“And he said something about me locking him in a fucking _ dog cage _ ,” Kendall is saying. He gestures sloppily and sucks the stray splash off his hand, never one to miss a drop huh Ken you want to say but you have no idea what the fuck he’s been talking about. “A fucking cage! I mean yeah I did it but he _ liked _ it you know? I wouldn’t have hurt him. He liked playing like he was a puppy. He was uh a weird fucking kid. ”

“Sounds pretty gay bro,” you say absently and Ken’s face twitches and he says “oh fucking gross Stewy that’s my brother.”

“Why are you talking about your brother’s gay incest pet play BDSM fetish,” you ask. Quite reasonably you think.

“My -- _ Jesus _ ,” Kendall says. “What is _ wrong _ with everyone I know.”

“You’re the common denominator, motherfucker,” you say. “Drink up.”

So you both drink up and you keep drinking up until you’ve set Kendall up past the tipping point. After a certain point there’s nothing he won’t do. There’s a seam of recklessness inside him, like he was born cracked open. You know just how to get your fingers right in there.

“Hey, Ken,” you say. Dust motes floating and the TV on mute playing some shitty rapper, not your pick, you’re a house kind of a guy but Ken just gets so excited about these things. He can name every LP, every track, every fucking studio session, which he is doing now although you quite specifically did not ask. He is physically incapable of doing anything by half. You’ve always liked that appetite of his. 

“Yeah,” he slurs, fucked up, blurry, big playful smile shy in the cage of his face.

“Come here,” you say, and he comes to heel. Hovering. You must be more fucked up than you initially thought because you reach out and put your hand on the soft back of his neck, where you can feel the articulation of his spine. The tender little hollow. Greasy with sweat. You pull him towards you and you see his face’s raw change like you’re watching hi-fidelity Bloomberg fucking primo quality trading floor footage, like he’s an unwinding stock ticker. _ Buy now _says the chyron that’s his face. 

“What’s going on,” you try again. One more time. "Why did you fuck me."

It’s like he flinches but catches himself at the same time and the result is that weird spastic tic again. Which the last time you saw that was right before rehab, itself preceded by a solid attempt at what at the time seemed just like a semi-alarming dedication to having perhaps Too Much Fun but was in retrospect a leisurely suicide attempt. The scenic route. He doesn’t know you know what it really was. But you do. You wiped his puke off him, you stopped him from fucking stopping his heart with fucking reconstituted Xannies that one time. You were his friend. His face crumples for a second but is firm.

“I saw my dad’s --” he starts and you say oh _ fuck you_.

“What if I tell you you told me something different last night,” you say.

“I didn’t,” he says quickly before he realises his mistake. 

“So there _ is _ something different,” you say.

“No. No no no no,” he says. Like it’s being pulled out by a fishhook, his mouth rounding against the blade as it’s pulled out. Ow ow ow.

“Quit the bullshit Ken.”

“No no -- Stewy, look, I promise you, that’s it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look,” Kendall says. That weird flat voice. “What do you want from me? You want me to uh uh I don’t know like fucking --” he waves a hand as if he’s frustrated but his voice is muted, strangled, “give you more power on the board? Restructure your equity? General partner in the investment wing? You want me to like fuckin I don't know, uh. You want me to suck your dick, bro?”

Well hey. That’s no fair. He knows you have a soft spot for getting your dick sucked and maybe even for him, when he’s not being a total asshole. Does he know that? You make a note to figure that one out. But at the same time, there's something about the two of you getting fucked up together. Brings you right back. That reckless streak of his that keeps him interesting. Maybe it's the gambler in you.

“What do you want from me, Stewy?” Kendall says. “What is all this about?”

“All this?” you say. Your arms are wild. “All this? What the fuck is all _ this, _” you wave your hands at him. “Ken, you look bad, man. Real fuckin bad.”

“Okay,” Kendall says impassively.

“Uh uh uh okay,” you say back, mocking him. “Look, dude, I told you you had a friend card. And I shouldn’t, because you’re such an asshole, but it’s still there. What is going on?”

Kendall pauses for a moment. Almost like a wince. He swallows. “My dad’s plan was --”

“Oh _ fuck you_,” you say. “Oh, my god, fuck you, Kendall. Are you _ serious_. Are you fucking --” You are so angry. “I am going to find out--”

“I’ll do it,” Kendall says, cutting you off. “I meant what I said. I’ll do anything if you back off.” He looks at you. “I’ll do _ anything_. Just fucking leave it alone.”

And you are so angry, so incredibly angry. You want to make this little rat fuck cunt pay. But the thing is as well is that although this is pretty morally fucking dubious Ken seems, well, kind of eager, actually, when you get down to it. Like: those big wet eyes looking up at you almost pleading. After all, you don't actually know anything about what he's hiding, don't have anything you could use. You haven't got leverage, just intuition. And he knows that too and also he knows that you know he knows that. He's not as smart as you but he's not stupid, either. But there he is on his knees anyway like the pussy he fucking is. “Do it,” then, you say. You are so angry you are not thinking straight (ha ha ha). Kendall is very close to you and his eyes are big and round. He doesn’t think you’re going to go through with this. 

“I'm serious. Don't tell me you're a cocktease now. Go on, bro,” you say, and you gesture to your crotch.

“I--”

“Go on,” you say. You try for impassive but you're way past the kind of fine motor control needed for maximal maxillofacial stoicism. You and Kendall -- a few times in college, yeah. Mostly too drunk to remember. But there was something fun about fucking him, there must have been, you went back a few times. That reckless streak, maybe. His face was like okay at best but he had a good body, you remember, he’d run until he puked most mornings in college. Plus now you’re in charge for once (right?), not golden boy. You can get into this.

“Stewy, you’re -- you’re not, uh, not serious,” he says, again with that weird flat affect, and you say “as a a fucking heart attack compadre.” You say “If you don’t hurry up I’ll throw in some more fun touches too. Don’t make me make you call me daddy.” 

He reacts like you've slapped him but you can see how horny that has in fact actually made him so let's go ahead and chalk up another fat point to Stewy's Intuition. He _is_ enjoying himself, the asshole, you can tell that too, and fuck him for whatever this weird gay shit is. 

"You are such a piece of shit, dude," you say, and he swallows heavily and says, "yeah", and you pull yourself so you’re sitting up straight. He is still on his knees and you pull down your sweatpants and he sort of twitches again. His mouth is hot and wet on your dick. You stretch out and admire the view. His head is mediocre at best but you can’t beat the sense of satisfaction you’re glowing in right now, just fucking luxuriating. Better than any happy ending in the world. Maybe better than the bullpen, than getting your dick sucked in a limo by a girl and putting it all on the company AmEx. You are face-fucking Logan Roy's precious little baby boy scion powerful idiot son and he _likes it._ Or would it be better if he didn't?

“You’d better swallow,” you say and Kendall literally rolls his eyes and shakes his head at you while his mouth is full of your dick which is actually weirdly hot. Your hips twitch and you hear him gag, which _ hello, nurse_. You hold his face in place and fuck it without letting him move and he chokes once or twice more but keeps taking it like a trooper until you cum and he spits it out onto the floor (which fucking rude). He swishes his mouth out with vodka and spits that out onto the floor too and sits back on his haunches and looks at you evenly. He is flushed, red, his pants tight. His eyes are big, round, glazed over with alcohol. He is much more fucked up than you are, you realise, and you're pretty fucked up. You wonder if he'll even remember this. Well, one last try.

"Hey Ken," you say. You take his chin in your hands and force him to look at you. "What happened." 

His mouth is still shiny with maybe your cum. He stares at you for a second and his face cracks, just slightly, just for a second, and then he wrenches backwards so he's sitting on the floor, almost overbalancing, the back of his head close to the glass table, avoiding the sharp edge just at the last second. 

"Nothing," he says, finally. "Stewy. Nothing happened."

"Oh, _fu--_" you start, and he looks up at you and he whispers "_Please_."

You stop. You don't know what to do with -- whatever this is. This is weird.

You don’t want to feel bad for him, though, so you don’t. And that’s the trick, and that's why you're smarter than him.

“Are we even,” he says, finally, and you tuck your dick, still wet with his drool, back into your pants. You lean back and look at him. You could get used to this.

‘No,” you say. You pull up your pants and you stand up. He is sweating, flushed, drunk, crumpled in on himself. He looks good down there, on your floor, on his knees.

You pretend like you’ve considered it.

“No,” you say again. “I don’t think we are.”


End file.
